choo-choo!

you know what we have to do a lot?

wait on trains.

you know what we don’t like to do at all?

wait on trains.

it would seem that at some point in time i was under the false idea that moving to illinois would mean fewer trains. wrong. back in fort worth, we would on occasion have to wait on this one train so we could get home. and i don’t mean just “wait”, i mean “wait for 4-6 cycles of the traffic light because the train is going 4mph and/or has stopped on the tracks”. this usually happened when 1) we were hungry and/or 2) we had just come from the wal-mart neighborhood market.

well, not much changed, has it? we live less than a mile away from a train (thankfully with no train horn). and sometimes we hit it just right. matt has hit the train a number of times (4) more than me (0). But he has figured out not to go there around 5:30pm, which is not only in the middle of rush hour, but apparently a key time for the train to pass.

last night around 8pm we ran into it. we were headed to hang out at quigley’s, chat with brian a bit, and enjoy some time out of the house together. the most direct route to quigley’s is a straight shot down liberty. i was driving, and had yet to encounter the illinois train. i thought “liberty is the most direct route so i guess we’ll wait” and “this hopefully won’t take too long”. false. after 13 minutes of making terrible train jokes, singing a song about how trains are dumb, and allowing the car to idle, we can pass.

to this i say, “i guess we have to learn the train schedule and/or re-route ourselves” and “what on earth made me think trains didn’t exist in illinois”.

but, the lesson here: trains come at 5:30pm and 8pm, so don’t go down liberty around then.

another lesson, if you are in a rush to get some where, don’t go down liberty because the train will be there. if you have just bought ice cream because it was on sale, don’t go anywhere, just eat the ice cream in your car because it will melt while waiting for the train. also, the train is an evil temptress, just when you think it is almost over, here comes another 50 cars just to toy with you and let you know you should have turned around 8 minutes ago when the discussion of what should we do came up the third time around.

learning the train time table and waiting not so patiently for the caboose,